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had gone down the lorry had arrived with the breakdown gang.
    I went out and had a chat with the foreman of the men; he clucked his tongue when he heard what had happened, and opined that I was lucky to have comeoff so lightly with nobody there to help me out of the machine. I passed that off without a blush and hoped that his practised eye would not betray me when we came to the wreck, and then, though it was after eight o’clock, we went off in the lorry to get the machine. We found her as I had left her, lying on her back by the wood surrounded by a crowd of yokels. The ground was hard, being summer, so that we could get the lorry right up to her; the foreman clucked his tongue some more and set the men to work. An aeroplane comes to pieces very easily. In twenty minutes the wings and the tail were off and we were loading the fuselage on to the lorry; in an hour and a half we were back in Stokenchurch just as it was getting dark.
    We passed Joan Stevenson in the village street. I stopped the lorry, jumped down clumsily in my heavy coat, and went to speak to her. I pointed to the wreckage.
    ‘There it is,’ I laughed. ‘I was just bringing it along to show you.’
    In the dusk I could see that her face was very white. I sent the lorry on, and it rumbled away into the distance with the mechanics all telling each other that the captain was a quick worker.
    ‘It’s terrible,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you when you told me this afternoon, Mr. Stenning. What are we to do? Where is he now?’
    ‘He’s in the woods,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know what we can do. He’ll know what he wants to do, though.’
    She nodded. ‘He’ll want clothes, won’t he? I found some old clothes of father’s that he’ll never miss. They’ll be a terrible fit. Father’s so much fatter.’
    ‘We must get him something that looks as if it belongs to him,’ I muttered, ‘or he’ll be caught at once. He’d better have this suit of mine till we can fit him out properly. We’re very much the same build.’
    She looked me up and down. ‘You’re much broader across the shoulders than he is,’ she said, ‘but the height is about right. But what’s it all for? Where’s he going to go?’
    ‘God knows.’ I muttered.
    ‘How do you think he got here from Dartmoor?’
    I started. ‘He was in Dartmoor? He must have had luck to get all this distance.’ And then I remembered that I had seen a headline in the morning paper over my breakfast at Manchester—a meagre and a sour breakfast it had been that morning—that a prisoner had escaped and was still at large. I remembered that I had commented on it to the photographer, and had wished him luck. I almost wished now that I hadn’t.
    ‘I saw it in the paper this morning,’ I said. ‘We shall have to be careful.’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ll have the window open to-night as soon as it’s safe. Mr. Stenning—will you come too? I don’t know anything about these things. Would it be frightfully inconvenient for you?’
    I laughed. ‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘I should have been a stiff little corpse by now but for him—and nobody any the wiser.’
    ‘It’s awfully good of you,’ she said. ‘He’ll have to get out of the country, won’t he?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He said he only wanted to be free for ten days. But I’ll come up this evening and we can have a talk with him and find out what it is that he wants us to do. I’ll be skulking round outside till I see him get in at the window, and then I’ll come along. That way, you’ll know I’m not playing any funny business on you. Right you are, Miss Stevenson—at about eleven o’clock.’
    ‘It’s awfully good of you,’ she repeated mechanically. She hesitated for a moment. ‘I don’t want to tell myfather or mother if we can help it,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t bring them into this unless it’s absolutely necessary.’
    I went back to the pub. The men were in